"William Greider" - How Wall Street Crooks Get Out of Jail Free

William Greider | March 23, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/159433/how-wall-street-crooks-get-out-jail-free

When Charles Ferguson received an Oscar for his documentary on the financial crisis, Inside Job, he reminded the audience that “not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.” Given the abundant evidence of massive fraud, Americans everywhere have asked the same question: Why haven’t any of those bankers gone to jail? If federal investigators could not establish criminal intent for any top-flight executives, didn’t they have enough evidence to prosecute banks or financial houses as law-breaking corporations?

Evidently not. Except for occasional civil complaints by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nation is left to face a disturbing spectacle: crime without punishment. Massive injuries were done to millions of people by reckless bankers, and vast wealth was destroyed by elaborate financial deceptions. Yet there are no culprits to be held responsible.

Former Senator Ted Kaufman was especially upset by this. Kaufman was appointed in 2008 to fill out the remaining two years of Vice President Biden’s term as senator from Delaware. With no ambition to stay in politics, he was free to speak his mind. He made unpunished bankers his special cause.

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"Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair" - Biggest Energy Blunder of Obama Years? Administration Opens New Lands for Mining

By Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair, AlterNet
Posted on March 23, 2011, Printed on March 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150351/

 
In a move that is likely to go down as one of the largest energy policy blunders of the Obama years, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday announced that his office was opening the door for 2.35 billion tons of new coal mining operations in Wyoming's stretch of the Powder River Basin.  

It's all about the money, of course and it shouldn't come as a surprise that Ken Salazar pressed the green light for more dirty energy development instead of funding renewables.  

The Powder River Basin (PBR), like most coal producing regions in the county, is not certified as such. Meaning, mining operations in the area do not entirely fall under the rubric of the Federal Coal Leasing Amendments Act of 1976 (FCLAA). As such, taxpayers are being hoodwinked into believing leasing our public lands to Big Coal is good for the government's piggy bank.  

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"Ellen LaConte" - Garden As If Your Life Depended On It, Because It Does

By Ellen LaConte, AlterNet
Posted on March 29, 2011, Printed on March 30, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150428/

Spring has sprung -- at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it -- and the grass has 'riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food -- all of which are also becoming more expensive -- or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can't afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it's 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops 20 percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

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"Sean T. Collins" - Tom Tomorrow to launch new political cartoon section for progressive powerhouse Daily Kos

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/03/tom-tomorrow-to-launch-new-political-cartoon-section-for-progressive-powerhouse-daily-kos/

March 29, 2011 @ 01:41 PM by Sean T. Collins

They’re two Left tastes that’ll taste Left together: This Modern World cartoonist Tom Tomorrow and progressive pundit and activist Markos Moulitsas Zúniga have announced that Tomorrow is leaving his slot at the online magazine Salon to become the first-ever Comics Editor for Moulitsas’s popular liberal blog and political community, Daily Kos. Tomorrow’s final Salon comic ran today.

On his blog, Tomorrow characterizes the move as a chance “to help create an entirely new space online for political cartoons,” something he says is sorely lacking in both print and online media. “The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online,” he laments, adding that his comic will soon be joined on Daily Kos by others, in hopes of “building up a go-to destination for progressive cartoon commentary.” For his part, Moulitsas recalls picking up alternative weekly newspapers for the comics before anything else, noting that despite their apparent popularity, comics and cartoons are typically the first thing ailing altweeklies cut. “But I still love the medium of political cartooning, and we are now at a place in this site’s evolution that we can make an investment in that medium,” he says. “We don’t just want to expand the roster of political cartoonists, but we want to use technology to help arrest the medium’s decline.”

As a comics lifer and a daily Daily Kos reader…I’m not sure how I feel about all this, actually. I mean, I’m thrilled that Tomorrow, who seems like a mensch, not only has a great gig for himself, but seems to be in a position to extend offers to other political cartoonists who most likely need one. And I’m thrilled that a new-media powerhouse like DKos, which has feet in both the analysis and activism wings of online liberalism, is investing in the medium of comics in such a big way. But it’s seemed to me for years now—and this has been true even as my personal political allegiances have shifted back and forth—that political cartooning exists to take complex issues and boil them down into simplistic laugh lines for the purpose of entertaining people who already agree with the ideas being expressed. Cheap shots and choir preaching, to be blunt. In other words, I’m more excited about the idea of a Tom Tomorrow-edited comics section at the Daily Kos than I most likely will be about those comics themselves. Now, if Tomorrow’s editorship sees a space carved out not just for editorial cartooning, but for bona fide comics journalism of the Joe Sacco sort, that’s something I’d get awfully excited about.

"Amanda Terkel" - Progressive Favorite Ann Kuster Announces 2012 Run

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/29/progressive-favorite-ann-kuster-congress-2012_n_842181.html

Amanda Terkel

aterkel@huffingtonpost.com

03/29/11 05:36 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- Five months after narrowly losing the race for New Hampshire's second congressional seat, progressive favorite Ann McLane Kuster has announced that she's jumping back in for another run in 2012.

"When I see what is happening -- in Washington, in Concord, and across the country -- it is clear to me that this is no time to sit on the sidelines," Kuster wrote in an email to supporters. "To fight for good jobs, to protect the fragile economic recovery, and to invest in strengthening our country’s future, this week I am taking the first steps to begin a campaign for U.S. Congress in 2012."

Kuster lost the 2010 race to Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.) by less than 4,000 votes in a fight that attracted considerable attention and involvement from activists on both sides of the aisle. Many had considered her primary victory as a big win for progressives, who fought against her opponent, the former presidential campaign co-chair for Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Democrats have high hopes for Kuster’s district in 2012. The district has gone for both John Kerry and Barack Obama in the past two presidential elections, and voters who come out for Obama next year may pull out more votes for Kuster. One Democratic insider said Democrats think Bass is vulnerable, pointing to the heat he has been taking on local issues.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) made Kuster’s election a top priority in 2010 and raised over $150,000 for the race. With the help of progressive grassroots organization Democracy for America (DFA), they made more than 157,000 volunteer phone calls to voters in her district.

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"Paul Craig Roberts" - Obama Raises American Hypocrisy To A Higher Level

By paul craig Roberts

What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia. In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.

Gadhafi has been a black hat for as long as I can remember. If we believe the adage that "where there is smoke there is fire," Gadhafi is probably not a nice fellow. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya.

Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.

Yet Gadhafi is being demonized, and Bush/Cheney/Obama are sitting on their high horse draped in cloaks of morality. Obama described himself as saving Libyans from violence while Obama himself murders Afghans, Pakistanis, and whomever else.

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"Paul Bucheit" - I Just Finished My Taxes. I Pay 18%. Some of the Biggest Companies Pay 0%. Something's Wrong.

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkrss.php?f=I-Just-Finished-My-Taxes--in-BuzzFlash-110329-67.html

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 03/28/2011 - 5:59pm.

PAUL BUCHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

My first pass through the stressful 1040 process made it clear that I will owe a lot of money again this year, and that I can't avoid it without cheating, which I am opposed to for reasons of ethics and timidity.

So to get my mind off the unpleasantness, I turned on the news. A report states that Caterpillar threatens to leave Illinois because of a 2% increase in the state tax rate, which according to a spokesman would burden the company with an additional $40 million tax bill. It just so happens that members of US Uncut Chicago have been doing research on corporate taxes for PayUpNow.org. "To the files!," I exclaimed to myself, happy to take my mind off my own problems.

I went to the SEC website and looked up Caterpillar's 10-K, which would show their income and tax records in recent years. The company made pre-tax income of $3.75 billion in 2010. The Illinois state tax rate of 4.8% would mean a state tax of $180 million.

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How Do Plants Fight Disease? Breakthrough Research Offers a Clue

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) — How exactly bacterial pathogens cause diseases in plants remains a mystery and continues to frustrate scientists working to solve this problem. Now Wenbo Ma, a young plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed research on the soybean plant in the lab that makes major inroads into our understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, a rapidly developing area among the plant sciences.

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The End of Empire

In an earlier day, our rulers were kings and emperors. Now they are corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers. Wall Street is Empire’s most recent stage. Its reign will mark the end of the tragic drama of a 5,000 year Era of Empire.

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The War On Science is Now a War on Education

When the news broke last week of the request for Professor William Cronon's email after his NY Times op-ed piece suggested that Wisconsin's Republican governor Scott Walker's behavior was contrary to the state's history of "neighborliness, decency and mutual respect," I was reminded of the old line from WWII survivors that begins with the words "first they came for ...." It is a phrase, an analogy, which has been perhaps too often used to decry unjust political conduct by raising the specter of fear of imminent harm, but this time, in Professor Cronon's case, I think it is appropriate. Here's why:

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